Limitations of Current Consumer Photography Technology
Communication between the camera user and the dealer or photofinisher typically requires written forms which are filled out by the user, usually well after a given scene has been photographed. Thus, in addition to the inconvenience of filling out such a form, scene-related information is typically lost or forgotten. Such information may include the user's desire to not have a particular frame printed or to have several prints made from a given frame, for example. Such information may also include the photographic parameters of the scene, observed by the user or by a sensor, which would have aided the photofinisher's classification of the scene to increase the quality of the prints made from the film.
Several factors reduce the efficiency of the overall photofinishing process. For example, in a large photofinishing laboratory not operating on a 24 hour per day basis, the film processing equipment must lie dormant for a period of time at the beginning of each work day until enough incoming customer film has been sorted to form one batch of a minimum number (e.g. 70) of film strips of the same type (such as color negative 35 mm film) to justify running the printing equipment. Of course, undeveloped film (regular customer orders) must be separated from developed film (print re-orders).
More significant sources of inefficiency in the photofinishing process include the mechanical steps required to maintain proper correspondence between each film strip and the prints made from it, as well as the customer's identity. These mechanical steps include the sorting and handling of each form or envelope originally filled out by the customer so that the envelope follows the customer's film strip throughout the photofinishing process and winds up with the corresponding set of prints.
One of the most significant sources of inefficiency in the photofinishing process arises from the necessity of reprinting an image from a particular frame on a customer's film strip whenever inspection reveals that the corresponding original print was incorrectly made (usually by an incorrect exposure of the photosensitive print paper to the developed film negative image). In order to replace the original print with a better (so-called "makeover") print, the exposure conditions ("classification") used to make the original print from the negative film image must first be corrected. The particular film negative frame in question must be re-classified and then reprinted while preserving the original prints of the other frames. The mechanical steps involved here include notching the prints to indicate the boundaries between adjacent prints and between adjacent orders in a roll of prints, as well as marking any original print requiring a makeover. Such mechanical indicia must be carefully followed in a labor intensive procedure in order to ensure that proper correspondence between each film strip and the corresponding original prints, makeover prints and customer order form (envelope) is never lost.
The problem of managing makeover prints is so great that one solution has been to use an off-line disk memory to automatically keep track of the location of frames requiring makeover prints. This system is called the Automatic Makeover system, or AMOE. Unfortunately, the AMOE system requires that the disk memory never loose synchronization with the film/frame location, and fails otherwise.